What Good Are Memoirs?

Dear readers and writers,

I just returned from Allentown, PA where I keynoted the Pennsylvania Academy of Sciences conference for the year.  It was a lovely event, based at the women's college Cedar Crest.  So many young women planning confidently to go into science were there, and a lot of them talked with me about combining family and career, something I hope they will all feel free to do if they want that combination.  There's so much talk about how women can't do both these days, but it's just not true.

One thing I've learned about writing a memoir is that it has embedded within it the message you have received from the part of your life you feature.  Mine is, I chose along the way, each time selecting the choice that made it possible for me to have both family and science.  I know my way of putting together that combination isn't the only way to do it, in fact I"m now writing a dual biography of two women in the top flight of scientists who also married and had a child, and who feel that balance is both possible and important.  I'm having a lot of pleasure as I go around and speak at colleges, research institutes, marine laboratories, hospitals, bookstores and each time, I talk with women who feel that giving up family was not going to be worth it, that science is fascinating but not sufficient to build a life upon.  It's important to find your core message and enjoy spreading the word about it, via your memoir and also by speaking about it to as many people as you can.

cheers,
Laura
Image credit; Creative Commons, with thanks.

My Book? It's About People Who...

Why is it so hard to tell people what your book is about fast?  They ask, "What's it about?"  My memoir is about, it's about my, well, going into science.  Lame and lamer.  It's about having it all, but wait, some of it is about having doors slammed in your face and..  Lame too.  It's about trying to go into science before men wanted women to join them in the field.  Sounds formal, cold, doesn't imply beheading frozen flies to make a buck.  I don't think one sentence can do the job.  My novel, The Bad Project, is the same.  It's a coming of age story.  But wait, it's about college women.  No, it's about ethnicity. Not just ethnicity, about how friendship can reach across those barriers.  But is that the bottom layer of meaning?  Isn't it really about how, no matter what your motive is, looking for trouble is very successful?  Or is it about love and support between friends, how friendship is the most important take home message?  Here's the problem:  if you only had one sentence to say, why would you write a book?  Isn't it because you had more, deeper, more complicated, more interconneted, less obvious, more fun, funnier, sadder, than one sentence to say?  How can you strain out all the good parts you were trying to include and summarize the book in one sentence?  Something is bound to be lost.  Any ideas out there about how to do it successfully??

Danger for writers

One of my teachers/friends is working on a book about writing into danger, and it has made me think about how writing pushes me into dangerous places I don't want to visit. Writing memoir, I find that the part I want to summarize in a post-facto conversation is usually the dangerous heart of the problem. In writing fiction, my characters try to do the same thing. It's my job to look over their shoulders and say, "No! Tell me exactly what happened, word for word, action for action, when you told him you were pregnant. Don't tell me how you told your girlfriend later about the encounter!" I can only account for the characters having the same danger-avoidance by noticing that they often deal with issues I've brushed under my rug earlier. Having them explore and feel the agonies of the moment gives me some aha moments about my own life. But there's pain, embarrassment, misunderstanding, rejection buried in those quiet mounds and if you dig there, it will hurt in the short term, no matter how much insight for the long term you may unearth.

INTERVIEW WITH MELISSA HART

LH: How did you get interested in writing?
MH: My mother was a writer, and there were always books and manuscripts lying around the house. She’d get up early and write in her converted garage. Seeing my interest, she taught me to use her electric typewriter and bought me a copy of Writers’ Market. I wrote a truly awful short story about a girl in a mental institution who befriends a white tiger cub, and sent it off to Seventeen Magazine. Needless to say, it did not get accepted for publication.

LH: What was your first success?
MH: At fifteen, I had a short story titled “No Paper Airplanes Flew” in a national kids’ magazine called Scholastic Voice. It was a fictionalized account of a substitute teacher who’d just undergone a radical mastectomy, and how her recounting of the experience tamed an unruly class of junior high students. (I was one of the unruly students.) Scholastic Voice paid me $50, and I felt like a real writer.

LH: What kind of books or articles do you most enjoy writing?
MH: I love writing literary memoir and essays that inspire readers to think about subjects—owls, adoption, lesbian mothers—in a new and different way.

LH: Do you have an agent? Tell us about your experiences with/without agents.
MH: My agent, Michele Andelman, left Andrea Brown Literary agency directly after selling my memoir, Gringa: A Contradictory Girlhood. At the moment, I’m actively looking for a new literary agent. Michele approached my writing with insight and helped me to shape Gringa into something that would appeal to editors. I miss her!

LH: What are your thoughts about marketing? Do you have any great tips on how to do it well?
MH: If you can write short articles and essays for magazines and newspapers, whether related to the topic of your manuscript or not, this is a terrific way to get your name out there. Most editors ask for an author bio, in which you can include the name of your book and your contact information. I also love to teach at writers’ conferences, where I can network with other writers, plus agents and editors.


LH: If you could go back in time and start over, tell us one thing you have learned that would help you to succeed better/faster/with less struggle.
MH: I would have asked my professors in my undergraduate and graduate programs for advice on how to begin submitting my shorter and book-length pieces to editors and agents. Believe it or not, I used to be shy, and I didn’t take advantage of my teachers as resources. After earning my Master of Fine Arts degree, I knew how to write, but I had to teach myself the business of publishing.

LH: Any other thoughts to share?
MH: It may sound shallow, but I’ve taken for my motto one used by Ben and Jerry of gourmet ice cream fame. “If it’s not fun, why do it?”
I try to write what I love, what’s fun for me to craft. Even when I’m working on a particularly tedious writing project, I try to change my attitude about it so that it’s pleasurable. If this involves consuming large quantities of chocolate, so be it.
LH: Sounds great to me! Thanks for your thoughts, Melissa.

Maralys Wills Interview on Writing

LH: I’ve enjoyed your memoirs and your workshops at writing conferences. I’m pleased you have a book out on writing now, Damn the Rejections, Full Speed Ahead. How did you get interested in writing?

MW: When I was a little girl, I lived on a ranch seven miles from town. I read all the time. Once I ripped all the blank pages out of my mom’s books and tied them together with string so I could write a book of my own. I developed a passion for writing books and it never faded.

LH: What was your first success?

MW: An article for United Airlines’ Mainliner Magazine. I sold them an article on my kids’ hang gliding for $350. That was a lot of money in those days, enough to fly to Hawaii! We took a trip to Hawaii on United, and there was my article in the seat pocket, and it was all I could do not to run up and down the aisle pointing to my page.

LH: What has been your experience with agents?

MW: I’ve been agented for nine books, yet it was something I did myself that sold five of them. You have to be willing to help. Nobody will work as hard for you as you’ll work for yourself. Three different agents tried to sell my biggest success, Higher Than Eagles. Longstreet Press bought it after Richard Curtis and a couple of others gave up and I sent it out myself. Then I got a fourth agent to negotiate the contract. Now, I’m working with Stephens Press. Damn the Rejections, Full Speed Ahead came out with them.

LH: What are your thoughts about marketing?

MW: With all the practice I’ve had, I’m going to write a book on that subject. I’ve had two great publicists and one bad one. They always want to send you to radio and TV interviews, but I’m not convinced that sells my books as well as being a speaker. I love to give workshops. They really connect with the audience better than these short radio talks. People buy the book on the spot.

LH: If you could go back in time and start over, tell us one thing you’ve learned that would help you succeed with less struggle.

MW: You have to take a class. No matter how smart you are or how many books you’ve read, you don’t know how to write without some formal training. It’s like going to piano recitals. You can go to a hundred piano recitals, but you wouldn’t expect to come home and play the piano. Yet a lot of avid readers think they can sit down and automatically write a book. Writing is like creating a brick wall. You want people to see the bricks, but not the mortar. Yet it’s the mortar that holds everything together. All those hidden techniques that nobody notices. Even the smartest readers don’t necessarily know about the mortar. Writing technique is what you learn in classes and critique groups. I wish I’d started taking classes years before I did.

LH: Thanks for sharing your insights with us, Maralys.

Glories of Memoir Writing

Last weekend in LAT book review section, Susan Salter Reynolds reviewed three books in short paragraphs, each stimulating my brain in different ways around the theme of memoirs. The first review was of Natalie Goldberg’s Old Friend from Far Away. From her book, the reviewer selected this line, “Writing is the act of reaching across the abyss of isolation to share and reflect.” Goldberg is not talking to me about where I am, but instead inspiring me to try to go where she is.

In the next section the review of Sven Birkerts’ book, The Art of Time in Memoir, shows him excoriating the navel-gazing of memoirists. He apparently feels that only the reflective insight, revealing “what Henry James called ‘the figure in the carpet’”, sets memoir above talk show chatter. I hate to be harangued and probably will not read this book, but Reynolds’ image from James is memorable and will stick in my mind. It’s so easy to walk over a carpet, even for years, without seeing the pattern. But if you describe the room for someone else, you look more carefully and it jumps out into view. How many times I’ve seen the pattern of what happened to me only when writing about it for the second or third time!

The final review was of Julia Cameron’s The Writing Diet. I wish that review matched my experience! It said creativity, as well as falling in love, takes the appetite for food away. Not so for everyone, more’s the pity.